


The Long Road

by Letterblade



Category: DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Dissociation, Domestic, Jewelry Feelings, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 21:04:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Letterblade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can see the large obstacles on the long road: the boulders and fallen trees, the bodies. The little ones have an easier time tripping you up. The root under the toe of your boot, the rolling pebble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Road

**Author's Note:**

> Because while Mink is remarkably collected and focused nearly all of the time, I have a hard time imagining somebody with that much trauma not cracking once in a blue moon. Set perhaps a few months after the drama CD.

You can see the large obstacles on the long road: the boulders and fallen trees, the bodies. The little ones have an easier time tripping you up. The root under the toe of your boot, the rolling pebble.

So Mink keeps telling himself.

The cord lasted for two decades, through prison, theft, the fights to get it back. It shouldn't have been surprising that it had worn thin. So Mink keeps telling himself, after rainbow beads catch on the cuff of his coat as he tugs it on in the morning, and the cord snaps, and what was carefully strung twenty years ago sprays across the kitchen with a sudden rattle like gunfire. Aoba squawks as one lands in his coffee.

"Ah--crap, oh no, Mink, hang on, let me..."

Mink grabs on frantic reflex, gets the knot and a few last beads and a frayed strip of sinew in his palm, and can't unfold his fingers. He just holds and holds until his wrist aches and he can feel the cold sweat slick on his palm, slick on the broken end he's clutching. It's all right if the beads get wet. The whole bracelet got spattered with blood, worse things, cleaned right off; he'd worn it through every day of prison, every experiment, every raid, one of the few precious things he'd had left. It's all right.

Aoba's moving, Aoba's saying something, and he realizes, only with that, just how much he's checked out. His mind feels jarred, slipped sideways, distant, a raw edge of some reopened gash bleeding, sluggish, as he tries to pull himself together. Mink jolts, forces in a deep slow breath, forces it out, forces him to open his eyes and stop remembering the hands that strung those beads. He could not let himself be like this in front of Aoba. He couldn't afford to. Not with the balance they had to carry.

"...hey..."

Aoba's touch on his shoulder is feather-light, and the hesitation in it hurts more than anything for a moment, and then Mink forces in another breath, and focuses, somewhat. There is no dwelling on that hurt. Hesitation caused by old fear still rattling around in Aoba's veins--something that Mink can make no claim not to understand, intimately.

"You're all right," he murmurs, gently as he can manage. He's still not focused, not entirely. The real world comes in pieces; for a moment he can only focus on Aoba's other hand, a pile of beads cupped in his palm. He must have gathered them. Mink's bothered by how much time that would have taken, how much trouble he's having with his focus right now. Pale rainbow beads piled in a different hand, fallen apart, to be put back together again with a different touch, but for a moment he misses the past so keenly he could weep. It's a distant, clinical annoyance, that he's so unfocused. This wouldn't have done in the old days, to be so vulnerable. It isn't fair, that with time and comfort he is becoming more fragile. He misses his strength, too, suddenly. Not as keenly. Bitterness catches in his throat. There had been nothing in that strength worth keeping.

"I wasn't asking about me," Aoba mutters, and a moment after that, Mink manages to find Aoba's face. His mouth's in a snug little frown, worry and concern, his cheeks puffed out a little. The world slides into focus, solid, jarring. Irrationally, rather intently, he wants to kiss that mouth. Aoba's mild annoyance so purely, preciously real.

"I'll be fine," Mink breathes. 

Aoba's free hand wanders down to find his, and for a moment, they just touch. Slowly, something hollow spreading through his body in the wake of the unwelcome scour of grief, Mink leans against the wall.

Aoba doesn't let go of his hand, and leans against him, face in the sheepskin of his collar.

"...your heart's pounding."

"Mm."

Huracan settles on his shoulder, after dropping a few more beads into Aoba's cupped hand, and puts his head next to Mink's ear, and very softly thumps. It's a recording, Mink knows, with distant and painfully clear calculation; a recording of his own heartbeat, when he is calm, because human hearts beat in rhythm.

For a moment, with very little shame, Mink simply turns his head to bury his face in pink feathers, and settles an arm around the soft, familiar curve of Aoba's spine. Artificial filaments, some fine-spun plastic, terribly soft; but he had always been surprised at how real they felt. Aoba breathes, Aoba shifts against him and settles in; Huracan has no heartbeat of his own, but there is the subliminal whir of his machinery, and that, too, is comforting by now. They shall all carry on.

"Mink..."

Mink finds what calm he can, gathers it out of necessity, and lies quite firmly to himself that it doesn't matter. He has memories, life, Aoba. "You can stop fussing, I'd say."

"O-oi." Aoba stretches up to kiss his jaw, feather-light. And then, calm and deliberate and intent, "It's all right if you're a little upset about something like that breaking. Anybody would be, wouldn't they? I think I'm getting better at figuring out when you're angry at me." He puffs out his cheeks again, a little, and smiles faintly. "Well, you never seem to be anymore."

Mink sorts through a dozen different responses to that, settles for a simple, "That's true." Promises of trustworthiness never ring true. Only actions.

"You--weren't going to work today, right?"

"No. I'll be with you." Mink realizes, just as he says it, how much he needs that, and a moment after that, Aoba kisses him on the mouth. His surprise is entirely reflexive by now, barely more than a little indrawn breath, a moment's hesitation before he closes his eyes and relaxes. Huracan makes some wordless, slightly tinny noise of amusement, and keeps thumping gently in Mink's ear.

Mink feels far, far calmer when they're finished.

"Could I..." Aoba starts, and then hesitates, sudden and tense. Ren bumps against his leg, encouraging, with a little patter of paws, and Mink realizes he hadn't even noticed him come in.

"Go ahead." They've barely moved, except for Aoba pulling back a little, chewing on his lip. That very particular face when he's afraid to push. Fear that Mink had planted the seeds of years ago, now tried to weed out in the only way he could--by simply being trustworthy.

"No, it's nothing...I'm sorry."

"Aoba," Ren says, with no particular inflection but great intent, a coded reminder that his sensitive master could unpack into an entire reassuring speech, and Mink's quite grateful to the little creature in that moment. They had both learned, after all, with Aoba's illness. Even if no habit can be changed in a day, and old problems must be dealt with slowly.

"...mm. I." Aoba sucks a deep breath, and looks up, and Mink reaches to cup his cheek, very gently, and gold eyes widen. "I-it's okay if not, but could I--restring it for you?"

It's such a perfect offer that Mink barely even blinks, even when he could not have expected it, and even when it aches, deep down.

"I'd like that."

Aoba gasps in surprise, and then smiles, bright and startled and grateful. "I'm glad..."

"Hn." Mink forces his other hand to move, very carefully drops the last few beads, the broken string, into Aoba's hand with the rest. "Find a bowl to put them in. Let's get some air."

"Outside?" Aoba blinks down at what's in his hand for a moment. "Ah, of course--you don't need tools to string something like this, do you?"

Mink just nods. He can move, now, he can breathe easy; his mind still feels oddly stunned, sluggish, but Aoba is here, Aoba is real, and kind beyond all necessity, and that, as always, means everything. He pushes off the wall, feels Huracan adjust his perch on his shoulder, and blinks at the kitchen for a moment.

"Aoba and I found them all," Huracan informs him, without prompting.

"Mm."

"We'll need--ah, let me!" Aoba pours the beads into a bowl with a rattle, and then trots to the other room, feathers bouncing. Mink follows, slow, reluctant to so much as be out of his sight, to see Aoba poking through his supplies. "This..." Aoba plays with the broken end of the string, pokes about, adds scissors to the bowl, and then turns to hold out a length of sinew with the nervous pride of a student trying to show off. "This is the right kind--r-right?"

Mink touches it with his fingertip, remembers the deer he'd stripped it from, the strength of it, and nods. "Yes. That will last many more years."

Aoba holds his hand for a moment, belatedly adds the sinew to the bowl, smiles. "Many years. Yeah." He hesitates. "Was...was this from your past, Mink? You've been wearing it--ever since we met."

The only thing he'd kept, from those days. Of course Aoba would have noticed. He's always been like that, curious about every detail. Mink nods, gently herds Aoba towards the door.

"For it to break after all this time...I'm sorry..."

"It'll be all right." Mink tilts his head to the sky, just a little, as they step off the porch, and breathes easier still. The air is sweet today, the sun bright; he is alive.

It's not a workday for either of them. Fortunately. They'd be late. Mink had been heading out to gather a few plants in the spring, perhaps consider whether he would need to take down another tree for the stack of firewood. He has no wish to be around anybody but Aoba right now. At least anybody living.

But Aoba, soft and warm against his side, is--more than welcome. And Huracan on his shoulder. The thought of being alone right now is, frankly, horrifying. He squeezes Aoba, just a little, cautious, and Aoba buries a little smile in the feathers in his hair and snakes an arm around his waist and squeezes back.

It is not that he is becoming more fragile, Mink tells himself, turning over slow realizations as Aoba tucks himself against his side and they amble down the slope. It is that he is alive. His soul is in his body, healing, not wandering like the dead; he has a past and a future, and thinks and feels, and mourns and feels pain, as a living man does. He was not strong, before; he was simply broken, always, and now he has days when he is whole, and days when he cracks, which is all right. It has to be all right; he can't afford to think otherwise.

He sits at the edge of the forest, leaning them both against the widest tree he can find. Not within eyeshot of the ruins. Earshot, yes: a triumphant call from here, of hunters coming home, would reach every house. It's very quiet. Beads clink in the bowl as Aoba settles next to him.

"Was there a special order to them?"

Mink breathes a very soft breath, almost a laugh. "Not particularly. She was very young. She mixed up orange and yellow on the rainbow all the time."

"She...?"

"My sister."

"Oh," Aoba breathes, and picks up two beads, one orange, one yellow.

"You can do it how you like."

Aoba looks down at his hand for a moment like it's the most important decision in the world. Like all the balance of the past and the future hangs on two beads.

Mink closes his eyes and leans against the tree. Aoba--wants to hear. He has to remember this, always. Aoba wants to hear, and it is good for him to tell. "She giggled, when I told her they were mixed up, but she never fixed it. Said she would, but then said it was her special version. When we were older, there was a thunderstorm in the summer. Much bigger than usual. It was a great portent, not that we were old enough to pay much attention to what it was for."

"Was there a rainbow?"

"Mm. A double. Very bright."

"Aahhh, I don't think I've ever seen a double..."

"One ring of it runs red to purple, and one purple to red. They're mirrored. When she saw that, she said...she said that she'd been right all along, if it was two rainbows together."

Aoba laughs softly, leans against his shoulder.

When Mink finally opens his eyes, Aoba's already strung the yellow next to the red.

When you trip, on the long road, it hurts, and the humiliation of being on your knees may burn, but in truth, there is no shame in it, and you can still stand, and keep walking.

So Mink keeps telling himself.


End file.
